The Production of Word-Final Voiced Obstruents in English by L1 Speakers of Japanese and Cantonese

E-ISSN： 1470-1545|13|3|377-393

ISSN： 0272-2631

Source： Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Vol.13, Iss.3, 1991-09, pp. : 377-393

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Abstract

This study is a partial replication and extension of Eckman's (1981a) study on the production of English word-final voiced obstruents by native speakers of Japanese and Cantonese, in which he reported evidence of an interlanguage rule of schwa paragoge for Japanese speakers and one of terminal devoicing for Cantonese speakers. In the current study, data from subjects performing three tasks varying in the speech style elicited were compared to the broad transcription of English and to data from a comparison group of native speakers of English performing the same tasks. The inclusion of native speaker data allowed the identification of variants in non-native production as either interlanguage phenomena or native-like simplified or assimilated forms. Results showed that devoicing was significant for the Japanese subjects, as well as for the Cantonese subjects. In addition, the Japanese subjects approximated target variants significantly more often than the Cantonese subjects, raising questions about the sources of the variants observed.